On Sun, Jul 15, 2012 at 9:45 PM, Dennis E. Hamilton <dennis.hamil...@acm.org> wrote: > Um, yes, it definitely is the ASF that should be standing behind the ToU. > They're the only legal entity. > > Of CollabNet ToU, I know not. The terms.mdtext that Kay found are very much > the ToU of the original openoffice.org site, with someone's tweaking. So > Oracle used them. > > I think removing legalese is fine, until it become bad legalese. > > What more would you remove? >
A thought experiment: what if we removed 100%? In other words, had no ToU on the website. Would anything bad happen? What would the risk be? I don't see a ToU on www.apache.org, or in a spot check of several high profile Apache projects. Do we have some special risk that they do not have that requires us to put additional legalese on every website page? Are they helping their users less than we are ours? How? > - Dennis > > PS: I notice there needs to be some improvement in what the terms apply to. > The found one did not mention forums. I think it should be about the > openoffice.org domain and its subdomains. incubator.apache.org/openofficeorg > is a different game. > If we do decide to go with ToU, one option would be to have a set of "common terms" and then a list of additional terms which apply to only particular services. But personally, I'd toss it all out except necessary notices for things like privacy and trademark. We're not a multi-billion dollar corporation and we don't need to armor our website with legal terms like we are one. -Rob > -----Original Message----- > From: Rob Weir [mailto:robw...@apache.org] > Sent: Sunday, July 15, 2012 17:44 > To: ooo-dev@incubator.apache.org > Subject: Re: Terms of Service on Forums > > On Sun, Jul 15, 2012 at 8:11 PM, Dennis E. Hamilton > <dennis.hamil...@acm.org> wrote: >> @Kay >> >> Well, just to prove to myself that I can make use of the ASF CMS >> Bookmarklet, I edited the terms.html page. [I didn't trigger publication >> though, so you may have to find them in the staging place.] >> >> Here are the essential changes I made: >> >> I eliminated AOO-PPMC as the authority, since it isn't. I used the Apache >> Software Foundation as the HOST. >> > > If we think the ASF is the authority, then they should determine the > ToU, right? > > In any case, this looks like the old CollabNet ToU, doesn't it? It > looks like Dave checked in last August. It will fit our needs as much > as a stranger's shoes would fit me. > > In any case, my original suggestion still applies: Let's stop trying > to hack the legalese of existing ToU written by and for other > organizations, since none of are lawyers and we do not understand > fully how the parts fit together. Instead, let's state, in plain > English, what we want to cover in the ToU and then go to legal-discuss > for the wordsmithing. > > -Rob > > [ ... ] >> >
